President Barack Obama on Thursday announced he will nominate Marcia McNutt, president and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, as director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

If confirmed by the Senate, McNutt, 57, will become the third internationally known scientist with ties to the Bay Area to take over a major federal research agency this year.

Earlier, Obama named Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as secretary of energy. He also named Jane Lubchenco, an Oregon State University biologist who sat on the boards of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and MBARI, as the research institute is often called, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It's an honor," McNutt said Thursday evening. "With the high caliber of people President Obama has on his science team in Washington, it seems like an incredible opportunity to make science matter on issues of great importance to the American public."

If confirmed, McNutt would become the first female director since USGS was established in 1879. With a $1 billion budget and 8,800 employees, the agency is among the nation's premier scientific centers.

McNutt is a certified SCUBA diver who once completed underwater explosives training with Navy SEALS for her geologic research.

She has published more than 90 scientific articles, ranging from studies of ocean island volcanism in French Polynesia to continental breakup in the western United States to uplift of the Tibet Plateau.

After earning a doctorate in earth sciences in 1978 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, McNutt began doing earthquake research at the USGS center in Menlo Park. In 1982, she joined the faculty at the﻿ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she taught plate tectonics, geophysics and other topics until 1998.

In 1997, she was named as director of MBARI. Based in Moss Landing and founded by David Packard in 1987, MBARI is loosely affiliated with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It has a staff of 200 who specialize in deep sea research, ocean geology and chemistry, particularly off California's central coast.

McNutt's husband, Ian Young, is a ship's captain at MBARI. McNutt, who is also a Stanford University geophysics professor, has three adult daughters and lives outside Salinas.

The Bush administration's USGS director, Mark Myers, was a former geologist for Arco oil in Alaska who ran into controversy in 2006 after the agency began requiring nonscientist political appointees to review scientists' research on climate change and other topics before it could be released to the public.

McNutt said she would chart a different course.

"In an agency like USGS, as long as the scientists stick to the facts of the science and don't try to dictate policy, they should be completely unfettered in being able to say what the science is," she said.

Other top Bay Area geologists praised Obama's selection Thursday.

"Marcia's nomination is wonderful news, and an affirmation of USGS as a science agency," said Mary Lou Zoback, a geologist who is vice president with Risk Management Solutions in Newark. "Marcia, Jane and Steve are already on record speaking freely about science. I can't imagine they would muzzle any of their scientists as we saw in the past administration."